Spectacular.
The five-year survival rate across cancer has reached 70%.
“Succinct and smart…News Items boils it down like no other newsletter.” — Tom Freston, Firefly3 LLC and author of “Unplugged - Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu”.
1. More people are surviving cancer than ever before, as the five-year survival rate across cancer has reached 70%, according to the American Cancer Society’s new cancer statistics report. To experts, the figure is a marker of the progress in oncology since the passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971, when only 50% of cancer patients lived past five years. “That is spectacular. For someone like me, with decades in this field, that is so gratifying to see. There’s real progress when you think about therapies for cancer,” said Marcel Van Den Brink, the president of City of Hope’s cancer center, who was not involved with the report from the American Cancer Society (ACS). (Source: statnews.com)
2. The biggest harbinger that things were about to fall apart in Iran didn’t come from the thwarted anger of the country’s opposition or the frustrated hopes of young people hungry for more personal freedom. It came from the collapse of a bank. Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it. Instead, the failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the protests that now pose the most significant threat to the regime since the founding of the Islamic Republic half a century ago. The bank’s collapse made clear that the Iranian financial system, under strain from years of sanctions, bad lending and reliance on inflationary printed money, had become increasingly insolvent and illiquid. Five other banks are thought to be similarly weak. (Source: wsj.com)
3. Iran International:
At least 12,000 people have been killed in Iran in the largest killing in the country’s contemporary history, much of it carried out on January 8 and 9 during an ongoing internet shutdown, according to senior government and security sources speaking to Iran International.
After cross-checking information obtained from reliable sources, including the Supreme National Security Council and the presidential office, the initial estimate by the Islamic Republic’s security institutions is that at least 12,000 people were killed in this nationwide killing.
Iran International reached the conclusion after reviewing information it received from a source close to the Supreme National Security Council; two sources in the presidential office; accounts from several sources within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the cities of Mashhad, Kermanshah, and Isfahan; testimonies from eyewitnesses and families of those killed; field reports; data linked to medical centers; and information provided by doctors and nurses in various cities. (Source: iranintl.com)
